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Copyblogger Weekly Wrap: Week of September 19, 2010
Tag Archives: SEO
The Responsible Blogger’s Guide to Dealing with Big Brother
“What should I be doing better with my blog?” That’s one helluva question, isn’t it? As someone who blogs to support a thriving business, I think about that question every day. There are a lot of answers, many of which involve sexy topics like traffic, subscribers, and getting one zillion followers on Twitter. But when’s the last time you sat down and answered the question above with: “I should be paying more attention to blogging ethics.” Not so sexy. But as bloggers, we have to face facts about the world we live in. It feels like an anonymous platform where we can do and say whatever we want. But 2010 has a lot in common with 1984, and Big Brother comes in some forms that George Orwell never dreamed of. You need to be aware of one very important fact that many seem to forget: You can’t unGoogle anything When you launch your words into the blogosphere and social media universe, you’re laying a digital footprint in concrete. That concrete is the Internet Elephant, and it never forgets. Old versions of your site are cached. Facebook privacy blunders have ugly real-world consequences. And the Library of Congress is even planning on archiving our tweets. It feels like you can’t be held accountable for your rash words, but you can. Here are some tips on blogging ethics that will help keep your reputation clean. Especially if you’re going to make blogging a part of your business, you need to protect your interests. Your comments policy The bottom line is, it’s your blog and you have ultimate control over what gets posted in your comments section and what doesn’t make the cut. Please realize that whatever policy you decide on, not everyone is going to agree with you. I personally have a “post all comments” policy, except in instances of spam or blatant self-promoting garbage that adds nothing to the conversation. I also hold all comments that include links from first-time commenters for moderation (legitimate commenters are then white-listed). Some blogs allow trash talk, some don’t. Some allow profanity, some don’t. Every blogger needs to figure out what to do with the trolls . It’s your blog and your call. It’s always smart to make your comments policy clear. My developer is working right now on coding my site so my comments policy shows up in a cool style below each post. If you become known for deleting comments just because the reader isn’t a fawning yes-man, your credibility and authority will suffer. On the other hand, letting the trolls run free or allowing spam to trash up your comments won’t do your reputation any favors either. Proper accreditation If you use photos in your blog posts, use legitimate sources for images . (Assuming, of course, you’re not using your own images or photos.) Photos purchased from stock photo houses usually don’t require photo credit, although a few do. On the other hand, images you get under a Creative Commons license do have various requirements, usually at minimum a credit to the image owner. This should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: Don’t steal other people’s images or words and put them on your blog. That content doesn’t belong to you. It’s unethical and scummy. When you love a blog post so much that you want to send it to your readers, it is not okay to copy the post and paste it into your own blog or newsletter (even with accreditation) unless you get permission from the blogger. A better way to show your adoration is to select a handful of quotes (I prefer to stick with no more than 50-100 words) from the post and then provide a link back to the original post, with credit to the author. Understanding libel Ohhhhh — legalese! (The recovering attorney in Brian Clark will love this one.) Some bloggers make a hobby of calling people out for what they consider to be inappropriate practices, stupid decisions, or the like. Other bloggers are just plain malicious. If you’re going to go down this road, get your ducks in a row first. Read up on what constitutes libel . You owe it to yourself. What you might consider “free speech” could get you into trouble, as the line between opinion and malicious intent can be a very fine one. Make sure you have a liability insurance policy in place (this is a must). If you’re a member of The Author’s Guild, they offer Media Liability Insurance . You can also contact your insurance agent for a general business policy, but make sure it also covers libel and slander. You are not invisible Some people imagine that the internet lets them don a Cloak of Invisibility that bestows permission to do whatever the hell they want. It’s simply not true. You are responsible for your words on the web (and in life) no matter where you leave them or how anonymous you think you’re being. I don’t accept anonymous comments on my blog (including commenters who give fake email addresses) and here’s why: it shows me you’re not willing to be held accountable for your words. If you’re running a blog, there are some pretty cool tools you can use to verify identity or lend at least some level of “real world” status to a commenter you might hold in question. Email address verification tools: Did you know you can check any email address to see if it’s valid? Yep. And it’s free and easy. I use this one on a regular basis, but a simple web search for “verify email address” can point you towards others. IP address verification: Most comment systems (Disqus, InstenseDebate, and WordPress’s built-in system) display the IP address of every commenter to the moderator. I use WhoIs to verify IP addresses (I had to do this just last week for an unfortunate situation). If you continuously receive spam comments or inappropriate comments from a particular commenter, you can block an entire IP address from your blog. If you need help with this, just ping your comments system or hit up the WordPress Codex for tips on combating spam and unwanted comments. Disqus and IntenseDebate have built-in blacklist features. The best thing I can do here is to put just a bit of healthy fear into you. You’re not invincible, you’re not invisible, and you have a responsibility to both yourself and your audience. While you might have been looking for a more entertaining post on ethics (given my propensity for, ahem, colorful language), putting your thoughts out there on the web is serious stuff. As I said, nothing can be unGoogled. It’s not like a late-night TP-ing of your least favorite junior high school science teacher’s house. Drive-bys don’t work online. Strong ethical guidelines can keep your brand and keep your blog shop clean. If there are other best practices I’ve missed, lob them into the comments section below. While we don’t want to go all George Orwell, you have to remember that 1984 still applies in 2010 … and beyond (and it’s not such a bad thing). About the Author: Erika Napoletano is the Head Redhead at RedheadWriting LLC, a Denver-based online strategies consultancy. Her blog, RedheadWriting , is a bastion for “unpopular thoughts and blunt advice — delivered” and consistently strives to say what others won’t (but should) about marketing, social media, business integrity, and life in general.
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The Responsible Blogger’s Guide to Dealing with Big Brother
Discover Your Strengths and Supercharge Your Business
Have you ever been kept awake until 2 in the morning having an imaginary conversation with one of your blog readers who thinks you’re great and left a long comment telling you so? Or spent hours obsessively trying to figure out how to do better work, spurred by a fan letter from a customer about the terrific job you did? Or is it maybe more likely that your late-night solo conversations and obsessive problem-solving go to the trolls , the complainers, and the folks who just plain can’t stand you? Don’t worry. If you give an undue amount of attention to negative comments and feedback, to the extent of almost ignoring the good stuff altogether, it doesn’t mean you’re neurotic. It means you’re exactly like the rest of us. Chip Heath and Dan Heath in their marvelous book Switch make this observation: Imagine a world in which you experienced a rush of gratitude every single time you flipped a light switch and the room lit up. Imagine a world in which after a husband forgot his wife’s birthday, she gave him a big kiss and said, “For thirteen of the last fourteen years you remembered my birthday! That’s wonderful!” This is not our world. But in times of change, it needs to be. Play to your strengths I’ve long been fascinated by the advice to those who tell us to focus on our strengths, not our weaknesses, in order to create breakthrough success. It’s so appealing. You mean I don’t have to learn to cold call, balance my checkbook, or know how my RSS feed works? Sign me up. But it seems like it might be contradicted by another idea that’s gained a lot of attention recently: there’s not really any such thing as talent. Researchers like Carol Dweck and brilliant nonfiction writers like Malcolm Gladwell tell us that what we call “talent” is really the result of a heck of a lot of hard work. What are strengths, anyway? Until recently, I never realized this was a trick question. I thought that your strengths were things you were good at, and your weaknesses were things you sucked at. But Marcus Buckingham, who’s made a career out of writing about strengths, put it this way: A strength is “an activity that makes you feel strong.” It is an activity where the doing of it invigorates you. Before you do it, you find yourself instinctively looking forward to it. While you are doing it you don’t struggle to concentrate, but instead you become so immersed that time speeds up and you lose yourself in the present moment. And after you are finished doing it, you feel authentic, connected to the best parts of who you really are. Your strengths are the activities that give you the juice to put your 10,000 hours in. They’re the work you love enough to become the best in the world at. I’ll give you an example I recently heard Yo-Yo Ma giving an interview about how he got started as a cellist. As it happens, Yo-Yo’s parents are both musicians, and had high musical expectations for their little son. So when Yo-Yo was three, they gave the boy a violin. And Yo-Yo hated it. Wouldn’t practice. Wouldn’t focus. Didn’t have any zest for it. His frustrated parents finally gave up in disgust. And then little Yo-Yo saw and heard something amazing, something that surprised and delighted him. Something that he knew was exactly what he wanted to play. It was a double bass — the violin’s really, really big brother. Now that was more like it. He and his parents split the size difference, and Ma began to study first the viola and then settled (at four years old) on the cello. By seven he was a recognized prodigy, performing for Eisenhower and JFK, and by eight he played on national television, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. To have become so skilled between the ages of four and seven, he must have put in untold hours of practice. But they were hours spent on something he adored. One thing that interests me about Ma is that he isn’t just a brilliant cellist. He isn’t just world-famous and in-demand and a name brand. He also seems to be a remarkably happy and kind human being. He loves working with children. He’s been married a long time to the same person. He radiates kindness and a certain goofy charm. He’s got a great sense of humor, referring to himself at times as an “itinerant musician.” And he’s known for boundless energy. If I’m going to be a nationally-famous virtuoso, that’s the kind I want to be. Build your business like Yo-Yo When you see someone busting her tail to build a business, writing tons of great content, reaching out to potential customers, speaking and podcasting and doing everything we’re supposed to do to build a terrific content-based marketing program , it’s easy to ask: How does anyone find the time to do all that? The truth is, it’s not a time management problem — it’s an energy management one. When you focus on your strengths, you do the work that gives you energy. You do the work that drives you, that makes you giggle, that keeps you up late because you’re just having too much fun to stop. When you’re starting out, you do everything. You build the blog site and write all the content and do the bookkeeping and answer the support emails. Some of those things build you up and some wear you down. Pay attention to which is which. As soon as you can (it could be today), find partners who are energized by the tasks that exhaust and deplete you. If you can’t find the right partner, outsource the aspects of your business that make you want to crawl back into bed. And put your time and attention on what the Heath brothers call the “bright spots” – on what’s really working today. Put your time on the work that gives you juice. Do more of what’s working well. Do more of what energizes and strengthens you. Do more of what your readers and customers adore. Do more of what you can do better than anyone on earth. I know it sounds too simple to be real. But it’s how every genuinely great business — of any size — is built. About the Author : Sonia Simone is Senior Editor of Copyblogger, CMO of Copyblogger Media, and founder of Remarkable Communication . Share your bright spots with her on twitter .
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Discover Your Strengths and Supercharge Your Business
Why Being Too Diligent About Your Facts Can Hurt Your Content
Once upon a time, the world was flat. Now it’s round. Who knows? Maybe some day we’ll find out it’s square. It’s hard to come across a cold hard fact anymore. Drink 8 glasses of water a day. Drink 16 glasses of water a day. Don’t drink any water; get all your water from fruits and vegetables. The contradictory advice goes on forever. There’s almost nothing you can nail down with absolute certainty. Even your own content. When you’re writing a game-changing piece of content, it’s natural to want to nail that article down with irrefutable data. So you spend seventeen hours to come up with data from books, white papers, and online sources. But your research is tainted No matter how hard you work to nail down the facts, you’re going to run into accuracy problems. That’s because your information sources aren’t entirely reliable. Even if the source is reliable, the information may not be. For example, a magazine may accurately report the findings of a study, but who says the study results are actually correct? Here are just a few ways your research can become tainted: Research is often funded by lobby groups pushing their own agendas. Passed-down information can lose relevant bits. What was once fact has since been overturned by new evidence. Let’s look at them one by one. Problem 1: Research may not be objective Let’s say a lobby group wants to increase sales of lemonade. They fund research to find more reasons for you to drink lemonade. They pour squillions of dollars into their research, and amazingly enough, all that research comes to the same conclusion: lemonade has amazing health benefits. Of course, that’s not how the research is presented to you . The research is presented in an interesting, fact-driven way that makes you believe it. Given a slew of reasonable-sounding facts and a truckload of statistics, and most of us will change our perception . That’s not to say lobby groups are bad people. They’re just like you and me. We tell our kids to eat spinach because it will make them big and strong. Doesn’t matter if the spinach doesn’t actually have the nutrients to get kids big and strong. Doesn’t matter if we’ve cooked the goodness out of the spinach. The kids swallow the idea — and hopefully the spinach. We all present information in the best light. And when we add figures and facts, it becomes something written in stone. Except it’s not written in stone. It’s not cold, hard fact. It’s just one view, one presentation of the data. Problem 2: Hand-me down facts Use tea bags to polish hardwood floors. Mix turmeric and honey in hot water and drink it for a cough. Use the underside of a ceramic mug to put an edge on that dull kitchen knife. These are hand-me down facts. They work — but do they work just the way they’re written? Did the author leave out a piece of critical information in the re-telling? Perhaps you have to steep the tea bags for a certain amount of time. Maybe you have to be careful to get the exact correct angle between your knife and that ceramic mug. Facts often develop holes over time. As stories get handed down, they lose information. The main part of the story may be true, but misleading without key pieces of information that go with it. The only way to be sure it to check for yourself. You take those tea bags and polish a part of your hardwood floor. If the floors shine, you’ve got a personal story of your own to tell. Hand-me-down data looks valid, but unless you’ve proved it yourself, you’re quoting unproven research. And that takes us to the final problem: The data keeps changing. Problem 3: Facts evolve As recently as 1980, most neuroscientists would tell you with confidence that the brain had no meaningful plasticity. Plasticity means that the brain is adaptable. That it can heal damage from strokes, accidents, and other horrible things, and that it can change and adapt after the critical period of childhood. There’s now research (yeah, I’m aware of the irony in referencing research in this article) that all areas of the brain can change and evolve even in adulthood. Destroyed function can be “re-routed” to other areas of the brain. And intense mental activity (like studying for med school exams) can change the brain in measurable ways in a matter of weeks. I want you to understand one thing: these original nay-sayers were neuroscientists. They live, breathe, and map their entire careers around research about how the brain works. Some of the smartest people on the planet. And they were wrong. Today, neuroplasticity is an irrefutable fact. But who’s to know what will come around the corner? Does this mean you shouldn’t research your articles? Not at all. Research matters. Facts matter. All I’m saying is that it isn’t necessary to spend all those hours tracking down facts. Often, the facts you find are only half-right, or they’re just a part of greater truths to be revealed. Go ahead and do your research, but put on an egg timer. If you don’t get what you’re looking for in about 20 minutes, it’s time to get your own facts together. Don’t make up facts that aren’t true, but tell us your own experience. It’s better to simply write what you know. Not only does it make for a good story , you can be secure that what you’re saying is really true. Research makes things interesting, but your own case studies are just as interesting. So don’t be bashful. Use your personal stories and experiences more often — you don’t need fifteen sources and two experts to back you up. You might be wrong Sure, you may be wrong about the way you interpret what you experience. The neuroscientists were wrong too. So were all the smart, educated people who insisted the world was flat. There have been countless geniuses who insisted on theories that would ultimately prove to be wrong. Research won’t save you from being wrong. It’ll just get in the way of telling your story — and that’s more important than having irrefutable facts. Especially because the facts are never irrefutable. No matter how much research you do. About the Author: Sean D’Souza offers a great free report on ‘Why Headlines Fail’ when you subscribe to his Psychotactics Newsletter . Be sure to check out his blog , too.
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Why Being Too Diligent About Your Facts Can Hurt Your Content
Copyblogger Weekly Wrap: Week of September 12, 2010
Nope, I didn’t get fired. I’m back in the saddle around here, ready to summarize things for you and put them into an easily digestible, bullet point form. So why the layoff on the weekly wraps (now twice as delish with half the calories)? Well, it was summer. Brian and Sonia wanted a break from removing libelous statements from my scribblings, and I wanted time to pursue my hobby of reworking large companies’ marketing slogans. For example: BP: Well, at least you know who we are now. No? Okay, fine… here’s what happened this week on Copyblogger and around the web: Monday: How Eminem Stayed Relevant (And Why it Can Save Your Blog) In this post that finally proves that Sean Platt actually is Eminem, you’ll learn about how Marshall Mathers phoned it in for a few albums, then apologized, and then BROUGHT IT yet again… and how you can do the same to rebound from mediocrity back up to your A game. Read the full post here . Tuesday: How to Build Credibility with Your Sales Copy This post is the definitive guide to writing cred-building copy that will get past your customer’s defenses and get them to buy. (Dave called those defenses “shields,” so really, converting customers is like attacking the Death Star.) There’s three shield-busting approaches in this post, but he totally forgot “bomb the ventilation shaft.” Read the full post here . Wednesday: The Freakonomics Guide to Making Boring Content Sexy The book Freakonomics proves that even boring subjects can be interesting if you add wrestlers, and so offers a great model for making your blog more readable. (But if you want real inspiration, watch for my memoir: Exciting Tales of the Pennsylvania Municipal Tax Code .) Read the full post here . Thursday: How to Blog Like Bond. James Bond. Today we learned that the best way to build a popular blog is to drink, be smooth, battle supervillains, have indiscriminate relations with many women, and kill people. Or possibly there was some other lesson here, I don’t remember. You might want to read this post and see, come to think of it. Read the full post here . Friday: 3 Reasons to Tell Readers Why You can’t trust that people will listen to you just because you think you’re talented or awesome. You have to give them a reason to care and to read. One Brian missed: “Read this post or the bunny gets it.” Read the full post here. This week’s cool links: If you want to learn to do marketing… : … then do marketing. I could go on and on, but that’s pretty much the important thing to note here. Storyselling 101 : The fine art of selling more stuff through stories, in four easy steps (my own secret sauce) Six Critical Steps to Take Before Starting Your Social Media Monitoring Initiative : Hey companies looking to monitor social media! Do you even know what you’re looking for? Maybe pay attention to these six things first. 5 Tips For Aspiring Digital Copywriters From A Marketing Practitioner : If you want to write online copy, this is a great 2-for-1 list. You get five tips that suck, plus five pieces of advice that are awesome. How to increase Facebook fan engagement: an interview with Andrea Vahl : Want to learn how to better use Facebook from Grandma Mary? I suck at Facebook AND don’t have my own Grandma Mary, so I’m sold. Do I really need a list? : Naomi Dunford answers the age old question, “Do I need an email marketing list?” (Spoiler: Naomi’s answer is “S#@&!”) About the Author: Johnny B. Truant is in the middle of a free, 4-session call and webinar series about selling via storytelling (which is how he sells pretty much everything).
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Copyblogger Weekly Wrap: Week of September 12, 2010